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Description

This book assesses why some states chose to engage with transitional justice, drawing on the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The DRC has suffered one of the most protracted and deadliest conflicts in Africa in the post-Cold War period. Since the outbreak of the first Congolese war, the country has been caught in a vortex of violence, repeated breakdowns of peace agreements, and mass human rights abuses. Human rights groups have lamented the slow progress in ending impunity and providing accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by all sides to the conflict. Yet at the same time, as far back as 1999, demands to set up transitional justice measures in the country have been made. What marks out the DRC case is thus not so much the absence of justice but the seemingly paradoxical fact that measures to strengthen justice and promote impunity have been pursued simultaneously. This book sheds light on this paradox by investigating the drivers of transitional justice policies in the country.

Scholarship on transitional justice postulates that domestic actors are highly unlikely to effectively commit to transitional justice in the absence of international or civil society pressure, particularly in contexts of negotiated or pacted transitions. In the case of the DRC, this book argues that the preferences of domestic elites (comprising both government and rebel representatives) were central in shaping transitional justice processes. These preferences were primarily conditioned by the broader social and political goals the actors pursued in the context of the armed conflict and subsequent peace process, as well as by their understandings of the drivers of the conflict. By complementing approaches focused on structural and international factors with an analyses of elite preferences, this book puts forward an analytical lens which aims to encourage a more critical and complex understanding of why states pursue transitional justice. Politics ultimately frames transitional justice debates in a way that can both work as an impediment and a driver for the establishment of such mechanisms.

This book will be of much interest to students of transitional justice, peacebuilding, African politics, law and IR in general.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Drivers of Transitional Justice 2. ‘Standing on the Right Side of History’: Pursuing International Criminal Prosecutions in a Multi-level Conflict 3. Truth and Reconciliation at the Inter-Congolese Dialogue 4. Amnesty Debates at the Inter-Congolese Dialogue 5. Neither Peace nor Justice: Negotiating Disarmament and Transitional Justice in Eastern Congo 6. International Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice Conclusion

About the Author

Valerie Arnould is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Law, University of East London, and has a PhD in War Studies from King's College London.

About the Series

Since the end of the Cold War, the place of law in international politics has been hotly contested, even as in practice legal rules and actors have become increasingly important. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the role of law in armed conflict, peacemaking, and peacebuilding. This series will bring together cutting-edge, interdisciplinary scholarship on law, conflict, and international politics, encompassing the fields of international criminal law, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law, and law relating to the use of force, and conflict prevention, resolution, peacemaking, and peacebuilding, and resort to the use of force.